Neuroscience and psychoanalysis

A brief history

The dialogue between neuroscience and psychoanalysis takes shape in the year 2000 in London at the first international congress. Among the founding members of the ‘International Neuropsychoanalysis Society’ are great names. Neurophysiologists of such standing as Antonio Damasio, Eric Kandel, Gerald Edelman, Helen S. Mayberg, Jaak Panksepp, Joseph LeDoux, as well as prominent psychoanalysts such as Charles Brenner and André Green.
The stated aim of the new scientific discipline is that of identifying the brain areas that function in relation to the psychodynamic phenomena studied by Freud.
Antonio Damasio (in an intervention reported, if I remember correctly, in Spiweb: Prendersela con la neuropsicoanalisi: un problema mal posto [Picking on neuropsychoanalysis: a misplaced problem, translator’s note]) claims that neuroscience and psychoanalysis bear a natural alliance.
The phrase evokes quite mixed feelings and opens to a non-trivial question.

 

What does natural alliance mean?

Eric Kandel, in his highly successful book The Age of Insight (Random House, 2012), in broadening the idea of an alliance to several disciplines, hopes that artists, art historians, physicists, philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists will resume truly talking to one another, although it might not be possible to repeat the extraordinary experience of the Viennese salons of the writer, literary critic and salonnière Berta Zuckerkandl.

(I will attempt to answer the question, gradually.)

Why not seek to repeat the Viennese meetings? How wonderful! Provided we manage to rid the discourse of any conformism and opportunism.

It will be possible, Kandel continues, to talk between different scholars in the context of new academic interdisciplinary centers from universities around the world!
Even more so because numerous neurobiological experiments have discovered and confirmed our unconscious instinctual, erotic and aggressive drives, and have clarified the structures of the defenses that conceal them!

Are we therefore authorized to dream the same dream as the “unity of knowledge” of the Vienna Circle philosophers and of the origins of psychoanalysis?

Let us think of the journal Imago, wanted by Freud to bridge the gap between psychoanalysis and art; let us think of its editor, Otto Rank, of the studies on the psyche of artists...

Especially given that the biology of the brain, says Kandel (Ibid., p. 508), in no way denies the richness and complexity of thought: “rather, by focusing on one component of a mental process at a time, reduction can expand our view, allowing us to perceive previously unanticipated relationships between biological and psychological phenomena”.

A Nobel laureate in medicine, Kandel discovered that, within the sensory neuron, the so-called CREB, a gene, is activated and determines protein synthesis. This synthesis more or less persistently modifies the synapse, generating the two possible forms of memory: a transient short-term one and a lasting or long-term one. This would confirm the theory that memory bears an organic explanation.

Again, the question:
What are the sudden unanticipated relationships between biological and psychological phenomena?
A basic objection to Kandel’s writing:
Can psychism be flattened on the seemingly clear cast of the bodily read by Neuroscience?

Faced with the operations of neuroscientists of Kandel’s magnitude, one cannot help but be drawn, at least for a moment, by enthusiasm for certain aspects of their work, for the richness of references and extraordinarily optimistic perspectives.

Yet one cannot help but remain, also, deeply perplexed.

The apparent completeness and effectiveness of a certain neuropsychoanalytic argumentation astonishes and galvanizes, however, notwithstanding the seriousness and novelty of the research, a question arises.

First, how is it possible to infer the psychic from the somatic?
And also: how does one juxtapose the psychic with the somatic?
Does one not realize that this juxtaposition is descriptive, starting from what it is supposed to prove?

Not only because the problem of deducing the psychic from the somatic seems to be exclusively a problem of psychism (in which case, the somatic does not seem to pose the problem of its own deduction).
Moreover, also because it is unclear how the psychic might allocate itself somewhere around something that is simply bodily.

In this case, what are the relations to the bodily?

We might introduce as many new terms as we wish, we might talk about processes, about systems, (e.g., symbolic systems, verbal and nonverbal, and subsymbolic, within Wilma Bucci’s refined “Multiple Code” model).
We are free to discover images by way of a bridge between the neurological structures of the proto-self and consciousness....

Nonetheless, I firmly believe that in doing so, the underlying problem remains intact.

Even if we no longer name mind and body, as Wilma Bucci did, we cannot solve the leap from the subsymbolic to the symbolic in exhaustive terms in this way, given that the leap is the side effect of our ways of writing experience, not something that exists in itself.

One cannot help but realize that ‘locating’, albeit as the result of a mass of world-recognized research, is and remains a descriptive juxtaposition, as I said, presupposing what it is supposed to demonstrate.

Anatomical locating also leads psychism back to a form of writing, that is, to the written, inscribed, overwritten body of neuroscience. That is, to a body made writing and reduced to it. With the inevitable consequence of flattening any psychism to the apparently clear cast of the bodily as read by medicine.
Thus the unconscious, confused with the unaware, ends up time and again as the backroom of consciousness.

(A. Bocchiola, third article in the site).
(English translation).

 

Let us move forward in the history of neuropsychoanalysis

Neuropsychoanalysis, especially in the last ten to fifteen years, has developed enormously through the hyperspecialized use of refined technical tools, the exosomatic tools, as the philosopher Carlo Sini calls them.
These are specific means. For example, diagnostic imaging techniques such as single-photon emission tomography, which make it possible to “visualize” the functioning of the brain, even under the influence of drugs or other types of stimulation.

 

An initial observation and quite a number of perplexities

Following Carlo Sini’s view, we realize that the objects that are found/constructed by scientists, for example, the functioning of various brain areas, are by no means the equivalent of what is in the world, but rather the theoretical result of what has been made and produced in the world with science.
Increasingly useful and precise maps that orient thought and action. In looking at a tomography, we do not truly see how the areas of the brain function, understood as concrete things outside of us!

 

Everything then lies in the reader, in how he or she orients his or her thinking.

The point lies in not confusing things, and especially not confusing them with words.
For we have all become progressively used to the specialized use of the technical tools of science, a use that has progressively erased and erases awareness of the technical operation employed, resulting in the slippage in meaning about the truth of its object. A slippage in meaning that was already on its way since the time in which human beings, thanks to the tools of language, were strongly induced to confuse the work of speech with the reality of things.

 

Modern scientific practice constitutes, in this regard, the latest grandiose slippage in meaning.

Indeed, it is the technical and material peculiarities of the exosomatic tool, which the natural sciences sometimes use, that produce the corresponding scientific view of things, e.g., the famous sensory datum...
From this wonderful and mighty work descends the renowned wealth of knowledge and models that characterize the procedures of contemporary science.
Science that gives rise to the construction of a universal suit of “objective” discourse, an endless process of constructing the scientific truth of the world.

Remembering this may imply a transformation of the scientist and every human being into a conscious graphist (as Charles Sanders Peirce, American mathematician, philosopher and semiologist, would say) of the “history of knowledge” ...

 

From the beginning

We wondered earlier what improbable “unanticipated relationships” between brain and thought neuroscientists such as Kandel allude to.

Kandel and other scholars believe that what would be interesting is not so much the idea of a unified language (each discipline should keep its goals ineluctably different and logically separate), but the idea of “consilience”, namely, the attempt to open a discussion between narrow areas of knowledge.

 

An example of consilience according to neuropsychoanalysis

Freud, as we know, extensively emphasized that much of our psychic life is unconscious and is revealed only through the limited viewpoint of consciousness.
Recent reflection around different types of unconscious functioning has reached far beyond Freud, but often in ways he had preempted. (These are again the words of neuroscientists.

A new understanding of the role of unconscious mental processes (in our decision-making
processes) is said to have come from a now-classic series of experiments on consciousness conducted by Benjamin Libet (at the University of California in San Francisco), defined, by philosopher of science Susan Blackmore, “extraordinary”.
They show that an action is determined in the unconscious brain before it is consciously chosen.

These and many other neuroscientific investigations thus suggest that our feeling of wanting is merely an illusion, an ex post rationalization of an unconscious process.

Indeed, Libet hypothesizes that the process of initiating a voluntary action occurs rapidly in an unconscious area of the brain, yet just before the action is initiated, consciousness, ever so slowly recruited, exerts an approval or veto on the action, in a top-down fashion. Conscious experience builds slowly, taking hundreds of milliseconds to initiate an action....
Libet, through the electrical recording of the “readiness potential”, thus demonstrates that by simply observing the electrical activity of a person’s brain, one can predict what he or she will do, long before that person is actually aware that he or she has decided to perform the action.

 

Neuroscientists, again

Antonio Damasio speaks of the subjective aspect of consciousness, calling it the “self process”. In this process, endowed with a sense of self, we construct images of our body states and feel (conscious) emotions with respect to these states. Our conscious ability to report a perceptual experience derives from synchronized activity in the cerebral cortex, which emerges some time after the presentation of a stimulus, which is then diffused globally to critical areas of the prefrontal and parietal cortex...
It is this diffusion that we experience as a conscious state of perception.

Just as Libet discovered, our will to perform a movement begins in the unconscious! Just as it does in all sensory processes, including vision.

 

And more…

Thanks to functional magnetic resonance imaging, Stanislas Dehaene, a French cognitive
neuroscientist, found that conscious awareness (yes, that is what Kandel calls it!!!) of an image emerges relatively late in the course of visual processing, one-third to one-half second after the onset of visual processing. During the first 200 milliseconds of visual processing, the observed person denies having seen any stimulus. However, as soon as the vision crosses the threshold of consciousness, a burst of simultaneous neuronal activity occurs in a large and widespread network of brain areas.

It is likely, as neuroscientists involved in neuropsychoanalysis conclude, that, as Freud predicted, unconscious processes underlie almost every aspect of our conscious life, including the perception, creation and appreciation of a work of art...

There are flourishes of resonances, indeed, between moments of the two discourses, the neuroscientific and the psychoanalytic. Yet the two discourses are radically, logically different.
They cannot be merged or overlapped, nor can one justify the other!

Neuropsychoanalysis specifies that unconscious thought operates bottom-up, not hierarchically. It includes a vast system of specialized, autonomous brain networks that are capable of dealing with a number of processes, and therefore allowing for greater flexibility in finding new combinations and permutations of ideas.
On the other hand, conscious thought operates top-down, is driven by internal expectations and patterns, and is hierarchical, etc.

Certain neuroscientists assert a sort of absolute identity between objects that are inherently different.
Kernberg routinely states that affects are neurobiological structures. (Is this merely a figure of speech or is it truly believed?)

 

A second observation and again quite a number of perplexities

Even if we imagine that mind-body (hyphenated or unhyphenated, with “and” or without “and”) are substance, we must still agree that neuropsychoanalytic data are derived from reads. That is, from our ways of describing experience with certain specialized languages, through our theories, our tools, at a specific historical moment.

Therefore, it is utterly unclear how within two languages, neuroscientific and psychoanalytic, which are simply different, autonomous, and parallel explanatory systems, neuroscientific concepts may serve as a veridical printout of psychic functioning explained by psychoanalysis.

Moreover, since it has long been known that “causality” in the sciences has waned, having turned into empirical regularity, we might say once and for all that it is not the brain, the body, that determines, as a basis, mental processes (it makes no sense to claim that unconscious thought is based tout court on a vast system of brain networks, etc.).
It is we who record concurrences between mind and body, according to a statistical-probabilistic law!

Moving forward
The problem of realism

If we then begin to reflect on the fact that psychoanalytic language is merely a translation and an interpretation and, therefore, that things in themselves such as libido, dreams, oneiric self-representations... do not truly exist, hence, continuing to believe that language alludes to reality should begin to appear strongly pre-logical, or at any rate somewhat naive.

If we move further and reason on what used to be called exact sciences, we realize that they too are equally imaginative languages. Let us take medicine.
It talks about events (says the event-based experience) within its practice of speech, that is, it measures, constructs, translates in its signs. For example, the signs of EEG, electrocardiogram, RX, CT, MRI...

 

A second dualism

“In the current debate, it is apodictically assumed that there exist bodies, obviously biological, and minds, obviously psychological. These bodies and minds are said to really exist, to be things of the world, entities, in and of themselves, completely independent of the scientific writing practices that investigate them (roughly, neuroscience and psychology). Minds and bodies are said to be, in short, facts. The mind-body debate is thus tainted by a second dualism, that opposing scientific writing practices from their corresponding objects. And the correlate of this opposition is the naive model of truth as correspondence, namely, as the adaptation of the word (scientific doctrine) to the thing (reality)”.
(A. Bocchiola, article).

Let us move forward in the history of neuropsychoanalysis
The re-evaluation of Psychoanalysis by Neuroscience
The centrality of Emotions “confirmed” by neuroscientific research

More than one hundred and twenty years ago, W. James, an Irish-born American physician, psychologist and philosopher, wrote in Principles of Psychology (1890) that, if there were no body states following perception, perceiving would remain a purely ‘cognitive’, cold, pale, and colorless thing. If an object were only and simply perceived, – if it were not transformed into something felt emotionally – it would be almost nothing to us.

James is the great scientist who, by then an elderly man, listening to Freud’s lectures at Clark University in America, said to him: The future of psychology is in your hands!

Today, an equally important neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio, believes that James’ insights into the human mind are remarkable to the point of being comparable to those of Shakespeare and Freud.

James explains the way in which our body responds to an emotionally charged object or event, for example, fear. At first, an unconscious change occurs in the body: a change in the autonomic nervous system with its regulation, whereby heart rate, blood pressure, sweating, etc. increase; later, the cerebral cortex recognizes (we become aware of) the new body states. It is not only the brain that communicates with the body; brain and body communicate both ways.

While back then it was believed that it was the feedback of the body’s response to the stimulus that generated the feeling, and the feedback to the brain that accounted for how we feel in a certain situation (the stimulus gives the bodily response, which generates the feedback, which is responsible for the emotion), today, scientists hypothesize that emotion is triggered simultaneously by both the cognitive assessment of the stimulus and the specific bodily, autonomic and visceral response.

This means that the cognitive assessment is not based on the specific bodily response, considering it is the two facts together, or almost together, assessment (mental) and response (bodily), that generate the emotion.

It is through the fact of feeling that we know who we are, and this is unquestionable for all of us. Further, this is the core of what we call emotional intelligence, which is first and foremost the ability to access one’s affective life; secondly, it is interpersonal intelligence, that is, the ability to read (somewhat, let us not fool ourselves!) the moods, intentions, and desires of others.

(In light of our theoretical model, however, the whole story of empathy and mirror neurons should perhaps be revised!)

The emotional-affective core, what we feel, is closely linked to body metabolism and experience, even when we are not aware of it.

 

An observation

Do we not notice that the cleavage between “things” (objects of research), for example, the affective emotional core and body metabolism (as well as the cleavage between bodies, and minds, and environment), occurs precisely because of the language we use?
The intertwining of emotions, affects and body metabolism exists from the beginning!
It is not an intertwining by juxtaposition of distinct things, which are assumed to exist in
themselves.

Hence, let us no longer think of them as the basis of one another, nor as corresponding facts, but as equivalences.
Agreed, it does sound less easy, almost counter-intuitive at first (compared to the tradition and scientific discourse of neuropsychoanalysis).
If we think of it, however, we might slowly change our opinion: mind and body are almost the same “thing”, meaning by “thing” the event-based experience. They are an almost identical “thing”, only read by two different languages.
Equivalence does not mean correspondence.

However, scientists’ claims remain of fundamental importance and carry practical consequences of absolute utility, provided we keep well in mind that their research is on divided parts, thus parts deprived of all meaning, dead.

Mauro Mocchi effectively explains this, in his Commentary on the first three articles.

If the scientist, says Mocchi, did not leave the meaning of what he does outside the laboratory, he would not be what he is, namely, a good scientist. His, in fact, is the activity of dividing, “the most admirable and greatest power, indeed, the absolute power”, because the divided parts are truly such, deprived of all meaning, dead. To exercise logic, to analyze, is to hold still the “mortuum”; this is what requires “the most admirable and greatest power” [translated by O.M.].
It is precisely through this dividing (here is Hegel’s astonishing conclusion), that the determinate, the individual, each self, obtains its own distinct freedom, opposites form a whole, knowledge is turned upside down into mystery.

Our model

Our model, as is now clear, is quite different from the model that deals with mind and body (word and thing), united, to be divided, and then having to reunite them according to a monistic/dualistic/monistic scheme, as in an infinite game of mirrors.

Our model’s pictogram is the Möbius strip.

Let us therefore abandon any monism/dualism because:

as in a hall of mirrors, in the manifest scene of the mind-body problem, monism and dualism bounce off one another without requital and without the possibility of resolving the impasse they produce.

Indeed, if we proceed dualistically, we will not be able to find a transition point from one to the other, if not by slipping into monism, which means reducing the body to the mind, or vice versa. In so doing, we would also find ourselves having to explain how the order of meaning rises from the body of matter. Hence here we are, magically back to dualism....

 

We arrive at the Möbius strip

where the limit point (it is always Mauro Mocchi who comments, at the same link), the threshold at which it passes from external (or ‘body’) to internal (mind), from yellow to orange and vice versa, is and can only be hidden, crossed out by the intersection of the two hems of the strip.

In a red and green flag, Peirce asked, is the line separating the two colors red or green?

The answer lies in all the “ors” of the disjunctive syllogism, in the “-sive” between God and Nature, in the practice of “diairesis” (dividing technique), in which the divided parts count indeed, the accidents on which the gaze of science is pinned, but before that counts the act of dividing, the fact that a division between earth and heaven takes place. It counts that everything refers to a subject, to a substance, to a self.

A substance painted in the manner of Cezanne reimagined by Merleau-Ponty, as a vibratory boundary, poised between the colors of earth and sky. For there is a boundary.
And knowing this is the ethical heritage and biopolitical responsibility of contemporary humanity.

Let us return for a moment to the M/B problem and to an (agnostic) way of dealing with it, by a certain neuropsychoanalysis

(To better grasp the difference between their model and ours).

Mark Solms and Oliver Turnbull, two pioneers in the field of neuropsychoanalysis, in their famous book The Brain and the Inner World (Routledge, 2002) point to the possibility of integrating the insights of neuropsychology with those of psychoanalysis, leading to an interdisciplinary approach and allowing us to approach the oldest and most controversial issue of all:

the mysterious relationship between body and mind.

Solms and Turnbull: “competing positions are pitted against each other in science and tested experimentally to determine which one is correct. But not all propositions are testable. For example, how can one test the proposition, “God exists”? Loath as we may be to admit it, the testable hypotheses that scientists can work with are embedded in sets of broader propositions that are themselves untestable. These broader propositions define the world-view (Weltanschauung) within which a scientist operates; and world-views are not subject to proof. Science is limited to answering questions that can be asked within a particular world view; it cannot test the world view itself.

It has yet to be determined whether the various philosophical positions on the mind-body problem constitute “world-views” in this sense, or whether they will someday (perhaps soon) be transformed into testable hypotheses. We are of the opinion that the nature of the relationship between brain and mind (body and soul) is not amenable to scientific proof. Statements such as “body and soul are one” (the monist position) or “the soul does not really exist” (the materialist position) are not, in our view, scientifically testable statements. They are of the same order as the statement, “God exists.”
We believe that scientists can do no more than ensure that they are aware of the world-views they endorse, because the assumptions these entail will determine the experimental questions they ask and how they interpret them” (Ibid., p. 54).

Neuropsychoanalytic theses, to date, are countless.

Mark Solms, for example, a monist, speaks of mind and body as appearances, appearances that clothe the only true substance: energy.

A critical note

The real dilemma lies in the fact that the problem of the “mysterious mind-body relationship”, posed as neuropsychoanalysis poses it, does not exist.

In the sense that the whole mind-body debate, to the extent that it does not move from a
genealogical de-contraction of its own question, is doomed to irrelevance and to an eternal petitio principium.

This, despite the fame of neuropsychoanalysis, the importance of the researchers, the wealth of means employed and the quantity and quality of the results obtained, and despite the advances in proposals and clinical applications.

For example, Mark Solms, coordinator of initiatives concerning research for the IPA, stated a few years ago that it is not the other disciplines that constitute a sort of “court of appeal” for our discipline. As neuroscience initially seemed to be for psychoanalysis. What is important is our read as psychoanalysts of data that can be derived from other disciplines. The read of any data stemming from other disciplines, moreover, will have to be verified in clinical practice.

Nice juggle of power!

There are incredible naiveties in this neuropsychoanalytic operation.

For example, the model of truth as correspondence, that is, as the adaptation of the word (the scientific doctrine) to the thing (reality). Mind and body, in short, are understood as facts bearing correspondences between them.

Moreover, we know that the object of psychoanalysis, besides of course the dynamic, repressed unconscious, is the structural unconscious, already seen as “infinite object” by Freud in his Outline (online and in the book Body and Sense. After Psychosomatics); seen as “O” by Bion; as “infinite unconscious” by Matte Blanco; by Lacan...

This unconscious of the Freudian tradition, far from being the backroom of consciousness, is not the unconscious of neuroscience, embedded in some anatomical location!

It is precisely an infinite object, not in the trivial sense of ineffable or “endless finite”, rather in the mathematical sense of limit.

It is precisely that which does not allow, acts as a stumble for, the psyche (and psychology) and the brain (and neuroscience) to extend their domain.

And it is only because of this stumbling that speech and thought can make sense.

Our thinking does not fare badly because we cannot return to the indivisible unity, as Western metaphysics claims. Our thinking fares badly, fumbling, trudging, seeking improbable simplifications, as in neuropsychoanalysis, because we struggle to imagine psyche and body as (almost) the same “thing”. To think that theirs is a dis-identical identity.
In short, we truly struggle to imagine that we are simply declining an event that occurs in a different way.
That is all.

Why put two languages together, the medical, which speaks of the universal, and the
psychoanalytic, which speaks of the singular, individual, in treatment.

An example from physiology, sleep and dreaming

Let us think of the physical changes, read by medicine, of paradoxical sleep or REM sleep. For example, to the sharp drop in muscle tone whereby, when we are dreaming, none of us can flee, because we become motor-impotent.
We are unable to get out of bed and leave, unless we are sleepwalking.

Let us now attempt to put together the universal datum of hypotonia (the drop in tone) and those small, recurring dreams of anguish that we all have in which we feel ourselves falling down, as if we were sliding strangely down, off a sudden step. And we feel like we are truly taking that leap, or we even see and feel ourselves falling into the void of a precipice.

At this point we can no longer separate the fact read by medicine and traditionally referred to as physical, the drop in muscle tone, with its repercussions at the sensory level ... from the specific oneiric anguishes.
That is, we cannot separate the universal fact, from the singular, individual fact, which is the specific content of those oneiric anguishes, different each time and in each person, read by psychoanalysis.

Universal and singular can be synthesized as long as we have a clear idea of the particular, that is, of the part our time plays in this process, of the apparatuses or devices that today mediate between word and thing, or – it goes without saying – between mind and body.

It seems to me that to interpret transferentially in psychoanalytic treatment the experience of fall- loss present in the oneiric content of certain dreams of anguish, without taking into account the so-called ‘biological’ data (the universal drop in muscle tone), is missing something, a stunted action, so to speak, or incorrect.

Bringing together these kinds of different reads could also be a way of placing oneself in a different form of listening by opening oneself to other observational vertices, without necessarily assuming one as truer. It might be a way of not falling, we analysts, and patients, into the loneliness of pre-constituted thinking centered solely on the subjective and the inter-personal, and into the megalomania that often ensues. It might be a way to introduce a sudden gap, an unexpected decontextualization, and allow the patient to experience the astonishment of crossing a (logical) difference in level...

Let us then attempt to put them together, these two data, bearing in mind that we are talking about equivalences and not correspondences between entities.

How?

Let us imagine that the sensory impressions related to the drop in muscle tone flow in a continuum, and therefore cannot be detached, with the oneiric images of fall-leap, with their emotional- affective experiences, different in each dream and in each dreamer.

Or, let us imagine the ‘mental’ images and their affective experiences as an ‘internalizing’ of the ‘bodily’ data (the sensory impressions), and the bodily data as an ‘externalizing’ of the ‘mental’.
Let us now attempt to follow them thus, these data, to think of them precisely in their continuous reciprocity and mirroring, as on a Möbius strip: the sensations related to the drop in muscle tone, by internalizing, turn into the affects and images of fall/loss, which, in externalizing, turn again into ‘physical’ sensations.
As on a strip that, scrolling, rolls up then unrolls, to then roll up again, continuously.

Let us always remember that mind and body, internal and external, are not two real things in themselves, two pre-constituted things so to speak, which, after the supposed separation, must be reunited in some mysterious way. Furthermore, however the division is carried out, their (indivisible) reality is obviously never reached!

What is good to “know”
(Freely taken from Carlo Sini, Inizio [Beginning], Jaca Book, 2016)

“To have transcribed, translated into the various languages of knowledge the living relations of life practices [...], is a grandiose fact, certainly the most relevant in the course of the history of life on the planet we inhabit.

It is so because of the immeasurable grandiosity of its consequences on the level of human know how cultivated on the basis of its being able to know; but it is also so, and perhaps all the more so, because of the dangers to which it exposes, both the human living being and all living things.

We have seen that precisely the reduction of life to an external (and immense) sum of details is the first, decisive, fatal step of knowledge and of all knowledge.
It is its greatness as well as its limitation.
One will have to make the decision to know it.” [Translated by O.M.].